The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the
second release candidate for KDE 4.0. This release candidate marks the last
mile on the road to KDE 4.0. This release sees increasing participation from distributions, you can download packages for Debian, Kubuntu, Mandriva, openSUSE & Fedora or grab the live CDs from Kubuntu & openSUSE.

While progress on the quality and completeness of what is to become the KDE 4.0 desktop
has been great, the KDE Community decided to have another release candidate before releasing
KDE 4.0 on January 11th. The codebase is now feature-complete. Some work is still being done
to put the icing on the KDE 4.0 cake. This includes fixing bugs,
finishing off artwork and smoothing out the user experience.

Comments

I agree with you... I think it should be set as an option, like they did with the battery applet (classic theme and oxygen theme). For those who like the old fashioned,ugly, clunky and boring clock (like it is now) choose classic, for those who like the beautifully amazing animated train station-like clock, choose Oxygen style.

We'll probably revive the fancy trainstation clock, but as a different plasmoid. It might take some time until it's in, and it's not critical to 4.0. If you care enough for it, show up on the panel-devel mailinglist and state that you'd like to help. Ruphy and I will be happily providing guidance how you can get it back.

Hope that addresses your issues with being bored by a clock. :-)

And what is that, everyone being totally obsessed with clocks in KDE4, I like it because it's kind of strange and geeky, but sometimes I ask myself where this comes from ... :>

But i don't understand... it was there, and you killed it, and now i should bring it back? ;-( Ahm, can't i not just have it?

About your question with the clock obsession: The love for clocks was spread by people like aseigo and the whole bunch of plasma guys, always using clocks as demonstration for about everything. Don't say clocks wouldn't matter now...

The train station model and the current one sat in the same plasmoid for a bit. We've transitioned the first into the latter, then the first had to go because we wanted something really simple. Getting the train station model back is a matter of pulling it out of SVN from some weeks ago, renaming it so it becomes another plasmoid and backporting a bunch of fixes that went into the plain clock and are also applicable.

If I had a nickel for every time I've read "Clock Applet" mentioned in the same line as Plasma or the KDE4 Desktop, I'd be a rich man. It's as if these clocks are what everyone is most impressed or disappointed with in KDE4.

The majority of the posters around liked it. So obviously YOU are the narrow minded gnome, who pushed the poor developers into killing the trainstation design? ;-/ I'd say it should be default again, and you change your settings one time.

The majority of the posters around disliked it. So obviously YOU are the narrow minded gnome, who pushed the poor developers into adding the trainstation design? ;-/ I'd say it should be default again, and you change your settings one time.

The horizontal line at train station displays is a design problem of the technology and not a feature. Why should we, especially by default, imitate it with great technology when even train stations are switching to electronic displays? The purpose of a clock is to show the time/date and not to be interesting. After some time I find the horizontal line annoying and that it makes interpreting the time a bit slower because I usually see numbers without horizontal lines.

There are people who appreciate a hint of retro design, i'm sure you heard about the concept? And imitating something physical and functional as those clocks with great technology IS the cool thing about it. And it's what many love about kde, what sets it apart.
Because of that i want this as default, for the cool first impression. Should you really be troubled by that, you could easily change the settings.

I have installed the openSuse packages but I am having no luck with this release. It starts quite fast and seems to be more responsive than previous versions but my kde session crashes and automatically logs out after about 2 minutes each time so I can't really test this version.
Another thing is that Lancelot is not working. All I get when I click on it's start button is the dark shadow of a menu. I don't know if anyone else is having these problems or if it's the Suse packages or my specific installation.

well...
The fact is that there is a gradient. It's just too light to be visible.
Try taking a snapshot of a window, then increasing the contrast of the image with your preferred image manipulation package.

As it is, that just wastes pixmap memory.

There should be a way to turn it off anyway, if the style is to be of any use over the network.

I used dpkg --force-overwrite -i /var/cache/apt/name-of-package.deb
following that, I dist-upgraded and it all worked smoothly. It seems to happen if you have the rc1 packages installed, in which case, apt tries to upgrade them before upgrading kdebase.

This is my first install of kde4 that I actually was able to get working, probably more due to kubuntu and my lack of knowledge.

The first impression is that it is a bit slow and that some effects are put in place just to show effects rather than having them used as a mean of help/indication what is happening.

I.e. the effect used to minimise a window in kwin 4 rc2 is well... confusing, the vista aero effect is IMHO one of the only good implementations out there for such an action, which is just a composited version of what happens in kwin3 when minimising a window. (the aqua effect, and compiz lookalike are way to flashy distractive if you ask me)
This effect used in kwin 4 suits better with exiting a program than minising, just as that the opposite effect is IMHO better used to open a program, rather than being used for unminimising a window. Just as the fade away effect (now used for exiting a program) would suite better with closing a program which has an icon in the system stray.

Keep up the good work though and don't let people like me bug you too much :D.

yeah, nothing is as useless as a pager in the background.
still, i didn't figure out how to add the pager to the panel.
actually i didn't figure out how to change _anything_ in the panel setup.
using kubuntu packages...

A blackbox way to do it is drag the pager widget onto the *border* of the panel. This then messes it up the panel totally (it shrinks in my case) and the pager is not displayed properly, but if you now logout then back in it will appear on the far-right of screen. Only prob is that the left border of it is not drawn, clearly there are one or two things to iron out by the overworked plasma devs. We cannot expect something like a mattise (netbeans) drag and drop experience just yet I think.

First of all, I am a very big fan of plasma... Congratulations to all the plasma developers for their excellent work.

Second, I heard and read a lot about plasma being completely themeable, but I never found in documentation how to do it. Please, I am so excited about plasma and have good SVG skill, I would love to know HOW to make a plasma theme myself, and create a very very very gorgeous theme for the panel.

many things will only come available after the 4.0 release, and I'm sure documentation about theming will be one of them. A lot of the GUI work which needs to be in plasma is not there yet. I think Aaron's plan of doing regular (monthly) plasma releases after 4.0 is out is a good idea ;-)

Since Plasma is the centerpiece of KDE (like Aero is to Vista!), wouldn't it be a much better idea to finalize Plasma issues before releasing a Broken Knome interface package that offers less in control and customization than its predecessor (or its semantic namesake)?